SYNDICATE OF SOUND

 

The ongoing fascination with garage rock, the music created by young American teens in the 60s in emulation of British bands and West Coast Psychedelia, has a much to do with the aesthetic value that arose from the crude approximations of an earlier trend, and, most certainly, the realit of the lyric universe those one shot wonders were creating. Emotions were not poetically expressed , not disguised in  faux philosophy or glittering generalities. It was raw-dog honestly, simply put, self-centered and loud. In other words, it was perfectly teenage, juvenile angst. I remember, as I was a teen once myself. Heartbreaks were existential crisises of the grossest sort, and they happened frequently. Seems not much has changed since I've survived my worst thinking and behavior since then.

There's palpable misogyny in a lot of the hits by one-hit wonders and garage bands in general. "Hey Joe," the old standby favored by bands in the '60s (my favorite version is by the Byrds from their 1966 album Fifth Dimension)—wherein a man solves a relationship problem with a gun and seemingly brags about it—is the most notable example. Thankfully, most of the other teen-male "women are bitches" material does not end in murder. It was more like the young man howling equal amounts of rage and regret at the moon, wishing the entire universe would swallow him whole to rid itself of the cuckold's moans and swear words. "Little Girl" by the Syndicate of Sound is a bit different; it is neither a revenge fantasy nor a case of making the woman evil and mean-spirited. It’s simply the testimony of a rejected suitor, aimed at the girl in question, detailing how their roles have been reversed. She rejected him and gossiped about him to all her friends, but now she is persona non grata among her peers—friendless, alone, a pariah. It is a perfect high school drama: so venal, petty, and intensely felt. It’s a wonder how odd life’s lessons turn out during lunch period. It is a great song with a killer guitar intro, galloping drums, and monotonic, "talk-sung" vocals delivered with a tossed-off reading of the lyrics that makes you imagine a smirk.

SNOBSTERISM IN ROCK WRITING

 

Of interest, I think, is a symposium of sorts about music versus lyrics and what different listeners, writers, and editors prefer. I like to think that I've been a combination of both, but it's evident in my record reviews that I like to spend some time discussing and critiquing lyrics if I think doing so adds to making a point—a hangover from my Literature grad student days. 

The reason I started writing reviews fifty or so years ago was that lyrics were coming into their own as an art form, in a way, with the arrival of Dylan, Simon, Cohen, and Mitchell on the rock side of things. It was pretty much the standard to listen to both the music and read the lyrics at the same time, and to consider that both words and music combined to make a whole aesthetic object that would be far less intriguing, provocative, worthy of contemplation, and replaying if either were missing. Rock tunes without solid lyrics and an effective singer tend to be bland and generic, grinding through simple chords, and rock lyrics on paper, read without music, don't read well and certainly don't scan well. The unaccompanied lyrics, in fact, lack rhythm and sway, have no real meter being the metronome; they sound stupid, banal, and pretentious, in large measure, without the music. So I concentrated on both and, as I delved deeper into the literary canon during literature graduate work, became pickier about what I would find merit in. My standard became so high that I dismissed nearly entire genres because the words didn't meet approval. 

I generally dislike the host of progressive rock bands like Yes, ELP, and many others because the lyrics were the worst sort of poetry—the tripe one finds in high school poetry magazines. Over time, I loosened up as my tastes in music broadened, finding merit in lyricists who had no intention of writing in a manner like Dylan. What I seek these days are lyrics attached to catchy melodies, refrains, and the rest that are direct, freshly stated, unburdened by literary freight or ready-made cliché, and which fit the expression and emotion of the tune.

HARMONICA MELODRAMA : a fabulation

 
The last open jam I was at was at Blind Melon's in the San Diego beach area, a blues jam, and the room was lousy with guitar tappers , grotto mouthed garglers posing as vocalists, and horde of harmonica players in the audience, jamming along with the creaking 12 bars the band was putting out . The barstools and cocktail tables were awash in wheezing, freewheeling waves of unsubstantiated merit. Those not tooting along were arguing over who was better, Bob Dylan or Graham Nash. On stage was the city's super star harmonica player, Sturdy Gert Quakeshaker, a large man with a leather harmonica ammo belt draped over his chest. The band kicked into a shuffle in 17/2 time . Sturdy Gert took a large breath, sucking out all the air in the bar , causing everyone to pass out for a minute,. Good thing I brought my oxygen mask to this jam. When everyone came to, they saw the legendary Sturdy Gert Quakeshaker had exploded. It was a mess, and I never got to play.

Poetry in General, some questions, some answers

 Which poet’s book of collected poems is your favourite go-to set of works?

For the last few years it’s been The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. I like his personality, his love of the city, his cattiness, the sometimes gossipy tone, but I would say there is a rhythm in his joy at being alive in the art capital of the world , New York. He feels joy deeply, he gets sad and depressed deeply, but rebounds quickly, laughs, has a drink with a friend, he talks, he laughs, he reads poems and goes to art galleries and listens to the quick witted genius of modern jazz. He’s more than that, of course, but I adore his lack of pretentious language and rhetoric—as with many in his generation and with many other American poets, he found poetry , a profound and original poety, in plain language. Using clear language to contemplate and express experience, for him, makes what’s been experienced even more profound, exposed as being precisely the way we were supposed to see it.

When writing poetry, how have you chosen the form that you wanted to use that makes the best structure for what imagery you want to create?

How did I choose a form that provided the best structure, style and tone for the poems I write? Good question, always a good question, but I really can’t say that I chose a style, or even be clever and reverse the saying by maintaining the style chose me. It’s evolution, really, trying on many stylistic hat, writing a lot of bad, naive, self-indulgent poems in an attempt the poets to inspire me and slowly coming to a habit of compositional mind that resulted in verse I felt were the least pretentious, most honest, most direct . A friend, Paul Dresman, who recently passed and himself one of the best poets I had the pleasure to know, told me that revision was key, to remember that poetry was a craft, an art no less than any other art form , compositional or plastic, and that much of the time the best of what I considered the best writing , the most potent ideas, had to be taken out in order to find the images and the ideas that can be linked into a remarkable, hopefully memorable of expression.

Did Charles Bukowski write in all lowercase because he couldn't spell?

Why would a poet writing in lower case make you think he couldn’t spell? Let me ask another question: how would lower case compensate for an author’s supposed bad grasp of correct spelling? Think what will of the man’s chosen lifestyle , but he was a literate man and certainly knew the ins and outs of grammer and such things. He could certainly afford a dictionary.I will bet you that he owned several. Bukowski wrote in lowercase because hundreds of famous poets wrote in lower case, e.e.cummings being the outstanding example. Typing in lower case for poems was and remains a standard practice among thousands of published poets. In any event , typing in lower case wouldn’t disguise spelling errors in the least. A misspelled word is very obvious, capitalized or not. Bukowski, though, was a good speller, and any misspellings were deliberate rather than from an inability to spell. He wrote in an informal way, to the rhythm of actual speech, and using idiomatic speech at times requires unconventional renditions of words.

What did you discover about yourself while writing your poem?

Usually, I write to find out what comes after the sentence after the one I just wrote. I have a particular set of strategies, notions of musical phrase, cadence, rhythm, and structure I’ve developed over a good many years—and this isn’t implied that I’ve mastered this form of poetry, free, at all — and I’ve internalized these linguistic habits much as a jazz musician internalizes his training and notions of theory; I come up with a first line and consider what object, word, image, attitude it contains and try to imagine what sounds musical and rhythmic and a logical expansion on the details the first sentence contains. It’s theme and variation, improvisation of a sort in the moment of creation, seeing where the initial idea takes me, stanza to stanza, until I come to a place to a poem where it can end with a resolution (or irresolution) that satisfies me, and perhaps satisfies a reader. What I discover about myself is that there is another way to explore emotion, experience, spiritual and philosophical concepts without resorting to the mechanical language of the academy.

POUTING ABOUT PROG

 

The moderator of a Facebook page dedicated to music journalism asked its members what their general view of Progressive Rock happened to be. As with most who wrote for a time about hip sounds from young rockers, my relationship was ...problematic.

Never a great fan of prog rock, although I count Zappa's instrumental albums and most of the King Crimson releases among the greatest works released under the increasingly vague classification of "rock." Theirs is music that's stayed fresh in my mind; the likes of Grand Wazoo or Larks' Tongue in Aspic still make me want to write long essays on music that was recorded nearly half a century ago.

The fact that the music has withstood decades of changing trends, fashions, and fads comes from the singular obsessions of Zappa and Robert Fripp in how they ran their respective bands, the Mothers of Invention and King Crimson. Though their sounds were singular, unto themselves, distinct from each other in many ways, Zappa and Fripp were unafraid through the several decades of their existence to change styles, adapt new ploys, experiment, extend, and suddenly change course in musical directions as it suited their individual interests. Granted, there are signature tricks and sounds that one identifies with either band, but it's a safe bet that one can easily note the wild evolution of both through their long histories. 

It's the artists who continue to challenge themselves with new concepts that intrigue me and keep my interest, especially the ones who have a definite idea of what they want to assemble with the new sonic territory they've decided to invade, plunder, exploit, and make new. Not every eclectic spirit in rock is able to do this.For the genre in general, it started out as—and remained essentially—a one-idea concept: tricky time signatures, long instrumental passages, classical quotes, awful, awful, awful pontification of philosophical and spiritual matters in the worst kind of poetic form imaginable. Musically, it was exciting stuff, riveting, challenging (I lifted the tone arm to skip vocal parts and get straight to the extended trick-tempo jams ahead), but after a very few years, too much of it started to sound alike, sameish—a retreading of ideas already successfully explored previously. The bands in general created their own brand of genre clichés and repeated them.

For me, the tipping point was Tales from Topographic Oceans, the three-disc release from Yes that achieved the distinction of being even slower moving than the most lugubrious tracks from Pink Floyd. The lyrics were impossibly insufferable, grandiose, incoherent, and glutted with toothless bromides that at best suggested that the listener was on the verge of experiencing a miracle. The only miracle here was that the album did have a last side, a last track, a last note, from which one could again rejoin the land where one is allowed to think clearly about a world that actually exists.

I have many exceptions to my general rule of not being a fan of prog rock in general, but in general I walk the other way.

A FANTASY OF A SORT

 

There comes a time , once in car door moon, where a man has to grab the microphone that's been sitting in front of him for a decade and bring it too his wretchedly trembling lips. And in that time we note from home that the close up reveals sweat beads had formed on his lips and collected in a glistening pool in the filstrum, that tiny divit in the center of the face, between the nostrilsand the top of the mouth. America was about to witness a man Go Off Script and do something primordial and aristing from the bowels of contricted and foulness of bad faith and guilty trips to the shed, matters that had been restricted , regulated and otherwise controlled by fragile and finally dubious means of will power were giving way, splintering and shattering and crackling in whatever metaphorical sound effect might lead to a clue to the maggot brain pest control relays that now ran the cerebral circus. He twitched, he undid his tie, he stood from the desk and showed the audiences up and down the coast line, where the ocean slapped the shore line like a drooling vegitarian driving past a Meat City location, that he was wearing red and white striped clown pants which were pulled right up to where he kept his available cash. The camera pulled closer, his glasses were fogged up , the insanity was already coming out of his eyes with an energy that shorted out the tv studio lights and carried through the available powerlines and radio transmitters to the world at large . Cop cars blew up, left handed teen agers practiced their signatures on lined notebook paper, the city lights dimmed to a a color remindful of off stains that showed up over night on new shirts. But then he took his seat, set the microphone back down on the desk, wiped the sweatbeads from under his no
se with a single, elegant swipe of the thumb. Our man on the screen looked straight into the the camera. "Thanks for joining us this evening. With all the hoot and holler going on about the Prez, we have two representatives of the newly Youth for Nixon group..." With explanation, a test pattern baring the station call letters and a laughing Indian in full head dress came on replacing the man behind the desk on the screen, and just as quickly audiences were made to watch a scene from The Robot Versus the Aztec Mummy.

THE HERO AND THE FOOL

 

PICASSO AS PUNCHLINE?

 

Gadfly Patrick Marlborough offered a 2023 sorta-kinda-basically fence-sitting  defense of Australian quasi-comedian Hannah Gadsby's critical and creaky post-feminist takedown of Picasso with a piece claiming to detail what Americans are missing about her show. It's because Americans are unfamiliar with the Australian vernacular, goes the article's claim. You might expect a brief linguistics lecture to be offered here, since it couldn't be anything as obvious that Gadsby isn't really all that funny. 

It's clear from the outset that Gadsby's has no love for the artist, and is committed to debunking his myth and exposing his misogyny with a late comer's vigor. (I remember quite a few books and magazine articles about Picasso over the decades that hanged him in effigy for being a brute and all-purpose lout, but no matter). If enough people “miss” what an artist is trying to do or attempting to tell us / teach us/ lecture us about, and if it takes a nervously apologetic essay in a major online platform to direct us to the wisdom that was waiting for us, it's a safe bet the artist flubbed the chance to do anything interesting at. 

It's impossible for every misunderstood artist to be an anonymous genius. The odds are not good for even most of them to be any good as visual artists.  The more I think about, it seems to be the case that most artists striving to make big statements in abstract fashion are muddle-headed fools who have the talent, none of the less, to secure grant money to fund their projects and pay their rent. Her worst sin, it appears, is the smug obviousness of what she's up to with Picasso. Naming this project with the anemic and obvious pun “Pablo-Matic” previews a level of banality that is ironically break—taking. Is this comedy? Criticism? Post-feminist grave digging? Is this any sort of attempt to get us to see Picasso differently through a specifically focused lens? It is none of these things. Worse, it's none of the things in any interesting way. It's a shrug of the shoulder, a flat punchline, a cocked head, a side glance, another shrug, another try at irony.  All gesture, no ideas. 

New joy from an old jazz release: Arthur Blythe's "Lennox Avenue Breakdown" (1979

 Lenox Avenue Breakdown -Arthur Blythe (Columbia) 

Arthur Blythe, whose alto saxophone has cut through the New York jazz scene with both clarity and conviction, is a musician of rare vision—someone who, having honed his craft with the likes of Chico Hamilton, now stands among the most compelling forces on his instrument. Where others are content to settle within the boundaries of a single idiom, Blythe gleefully subverts expectations, refusing to be hemmed in by genre. His playing on "Lenox Avenue Breakdown" is eclectic without being diffuse, drawing on hard bop’s muscularity, the searching spirit of the avant-garde, and the agile inventiveness of post-bop—yet always rendered in that unmistakable, burnished tone that is wholly his own.

There’s a robustness and melodic inventiveness to Blythe’s lines that calls to mind the lyricism of Joe Farrell or Phil Woods, but he is equally at home with a technical bravura reminiscent of Sonny Rollins. Blythe reaches for the farthest corners of the instrument: he employs multiphonics and overblowing not as mere embellishments, but as integral tools for coaxing out gritty, timbrally complex sonorities reminiscent of the early experiments of Pharoah Sanders or Gato Barbieri. His phrasing can turn on a dime—from the buoyant, dancing lines of a Charles McPherson to sudden angular leaps and unexpected rhythmic pirouettes. Blythe is no imitator; he is an assembler of influences, forging a style where everything is filtered through his idiosyncratic imagination—a style marked by sharp melodic invention, surprising intervals, and an elastic sense of time.

The ensemble that joins him here is nothing short of remarkable: Jack DeJohnette’s drumming, Cecil McBee’s bass, James "Blood" Ulmer’s taut guitar, and a coterie of equally adventurous colleagues. Together, they construct a rhythmic architecture that is as supple as it is forceful, alternately locking into tight, syncopated grooves and exploding them into polyrhythmic freedom. The rhythm section does not simply accompany; it prods, colors, and challenges—shifting modes, slipping in chromatic asides, building up layers of texture that serve as a launchpad for Blythe’s exploratory journeys.Nowhere is this more apparent than on the title track, which unfolds as a shape-shifting, restlessly evolving soundscape. The pulse mutates, cross-rhythms collide and resolve, and the ensemble’s timbrel palette expands and contracts with painterly precision. Blythe rides above and within this maelstrom—darting with dazzling runs, scaling the saxophone’s upper reaches, and developing motifs with a dramatist’s sense of tension and release. The structure is loose enough to invite collective improvisation, so that every soloist is woven into the conversation, each voice adding to the album’s layered rhythmic and tonal density. "Lenox Avenue Breakdown" is, in the best sense, a jazz record that refuses the comfortable formulas so often mistaken for innovation. It teems with risk, vitality, and raw energy—a bracing affirmation of jazz’s capacity for surprise and renewal. For those who hunger for music that is both grounded in tradition and wild with invention, Blythe’s album is indispensable.

TWO SLAMS AGAINST 1980

 Two hot-take record reviews from the 1980s. I admit that I hadn't listened to either Mahagonny Rush or Gentle Giant in depth , the reason being that at the time I was at the end of my Hendrix worship and given up the quest to find someone who could carry on in the style Jimi invented after his too-early death in 1967. And second, I was never a great fan of progressive rock no matter how superb the musicianship , mostly for reasons that remained the same from Yes to Jethro Tull to Emerson Lake and Palmer to Kansas: solid composition and dazzling arrangements abounded hither and yon for all these bands, but the albums they made were an overcooked meal , a structural mess, a tinker toy cacophony of odd time signatures and gratingly naive and even idiotic lyrics. Some bands get a pass , mainly Zappa, King Crimson and the more proggy aspects of  Return to Forever and Dixie Dregs. But Gentle Giant just pushed me into the ground with their big, grandiose thumb, and despite all one can point as to their superb chops , they were just the thing to dampen a healthy sex drive.

Legend has it—a story so straightforwardly American it practically begs for a Norman Rockwell illustration—that a young Frank Marino ( a fine Canadian fretster actually), felled by too much LSD, was given a guitar by benevolent doctors who must have believed in the curative powers of a well-strummed G chord. Miraculously, Marino, who previously had never so much as toyed with a guitar, rose from his psychedelic ashes playing as if the late Jimi Hendrix himself had taken up residence in his fingertips. Interviews abound in which Marino, with all the sincerity of a Method actor, admits to being possessed by Hendrix’s wandering spirit; the prodigy self-anointed, baptized in the holy distortion of the electric guitar. This is the narrative—admittedly charming, undeniably absurd, and, let’s face it, comfort food for fans who relish a good yarn with their riffs. Accept the fable or not; the fact is unavoidable: Marino sounds uncannily like Hendrix, but only if by “sounds like” we mean an enthusiast’s copy—saturated in retro adulation and resistant to the winds of creative change. Rather than pushing the music forward, our protagonist remains firmly anchored in the late 1960s, serving up a stew of rage, reverb, and echo, but somehow missing the subtlety and elegance that occasionally graced Hendrix’s own take on the blues. The problem with Marino and his band, Mahogany Rush, is simple: they can’t, for all their technical fireworks, stitch together a truly memorable song. What we get instead is an endless parade of solos—the musical equivalent of drowning a delicate soufflé in ketchup, offending both taste and decorum. Marino’s technical flair, while impressive, wears thin with repetition; what starts as style soon surrenders to sameness. What’s Next, their latest effort, feels custom-built for the crowd that treats Hendrix like a household god and flinches at the idea that better guitarists might have come along since. One suspects Marino imagines himself as the fretboard’s messiah, the Second Coming of Stratocaster—a fantasy as American as a slice of pie at a state fair.

On to Gentle Giant’s release Civilian, then. There was a time when dabbling with classical motifs in rock identified you as a pop intellectual; Gentle Giant, to their credit, maintained a rare sense of structure and discipline. Now, as trends shift, they appear to be courting mainstream approval, watering down their complexity in a bid for broader appeal. The result is a pale shadow of their earlier work, teetering dangerously close to parody. The compositions tread cautiously within the lines of mediocrity, giving innovation a wide berth. Aside from a few pleasant group interludes, the music plods along, lacking verve. Derek Shulman’s vocals—a plaintive, diluted cry—never soared, and the lyrics, steeped in existential angst, are less soul-searching than mere poetic brooding. Such lines inspire not empathy, but the urge to offer a brisk, corrective nudge—not necessarily below the belt, but somewhere more likely to wake the spirit.

Slow Train Coming

 Slow Train Coming -- Bob Dylan (1979)

Consider Dylan’s born-again phase, and the insistent pulpit pounding of Slow Train Coming—a friend tried to convince me it’s full of conviction and creative worth, but I’m not buying. Dylan’s biblical borrowings aren’t new currency; he’s been strip-mining scripture since day one, patching together Old Testament thunder and parched gospel imagery, whether he’s riding the tide in “When the Ship Comes In” or picking at spiritual scabs in John Wesley Harding. Dylan isn’t just a magpie for sacred texts—he’s the master of turning tired idioms inside out, his voice always straying somewhere between prophetic and profane. At his best, he traffics in existential uncertainty, never content to hand out answers, always inviting you into the labyrinth knowing you’ll never find the center.

Slow Train Coming, though, is a different beast. Masks off. Subtlety gone. Instead, you get blunt-force dogma, Dylan as Sunday school disciplinarian, rallying the troops with “You gotta serve somebody” sermons and threats of damnation for the unconverted. Gone is the sly relativism, replaced by the flat certainty of the freshly saved: you’re either in or you’re out, no questions, no shades of gray. If spiritual crisis was once the engine of his art, now it’s just a flag waved in your face. Sure, maybe faith gave him a ladder out of whatever existential sinkhole he’d fallen into, and I won’t begrudge the man his lifeline. But what’s missing is any trace of introspection—he’s no Eliot or Greene, no Lewis, just a preacher at a tent revival, voice all brimstone, the ambiguity left to rot behind the altar.

Let’s be clear: Dylan burned bright in the ’60s, then spent the following years outrunning the shadow of his own genius, sometimes with pyrotechnic self-destruction (see: Self Portrait). Slow Train Coming feels less like a second coming and more like a warning flare. If you spend all your insight on one revelation, what do you have left for the long road ahead? Dylan’s latest incarnation is the saddest of all: a legend gutted by the weight of his own myth, now stuffed full of the easy certainties of the converted. In the end, it’s a cautionary tale for anyone tempted by answers that come too easily—listen closely, even if the tune’s gone flat.